Challenger Inoue Enryo

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Another large administrative merger was carried out in the Heisei era (1989–2019) resulting in a total of 1,720 municipalities. Many of the names of towns and villages were also changed during this time. So, in 2013 we took the data based on the old lecture tour locations and reorganized it according to prefecture and touring year. The re-sults are shown in Figure 11 below. This shows that Enryō visited an average of approximately sixty percent of the municipalities in each prefecture (in today’s terms). (See MIURA Setsuo, “Database of Inoue Enryō’s Nationwide Lecture Tours,” Annual Report of the Inoue Enryo Center, no. 22, 2013). In 1918 Enryō turned sixty years old. When graduates of the Phi-losophy Academy suggested holding a party to celebrate Enryō said, “If I walk for another four or five years, I will have gone to every single part of Japan. Then, you can throw a party celebrating the completed nationwide tour. Save the celebrations.” It appears that Enryō had a clear picture in his mind of where he had lectured and where he was yet to go. 186